Baidu, the ‘Chinese Google’, now accepting bitcoin for security services

Chinese search giant Baidu has announced it will now accept digital currency bitcoin for portions of its security services.

In the United States, Baidu is the 130rd most popular website. But in China it is number one, which, considering the country’s 1.3 billion people, makes it the fifth most popular website worldwide, according to data from Alexa. The company is often called the “Google of China” as its main business is search, but offers many auxiliary services, both free and paid. It’s share value on the NASDAQ has roughly doubled in the last few months.

At this point, Baidu is only taking bitcoin for Jiasule, a security service that provides firewalls and helps fend of distributed denial of service attacks. Companies like CloudFlare in the United States provide similar services which help websites deal with a barrage of traffic, whether from good guys or bad guys. So it’s important to be clear that the adoption is not across the entire company.

Recent bitcoin exchange rate on Mt Gox

Bitcoin, seen as a savior and a scourge for Internet commerce, has had an up and down year. The (almost) anonymous digital currency’s conversion value went over $220 in March only to plummet to around $70, then slowly recover. Then in late September, Silk Road, a deep Internet marketplace of mostly illegal transactions that only accepted bitcoin, was shuttered by law enforcement after Jeff Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind, was arrested on charges of drug trafficking and hiring a hitman, among others.

On the Baidu news, the currency’s exchange rate value increased by a few dollars, not enough to say it was significantly affected. While the Chinese yuan makes up 12% of the exchanged currency, the US dollar still accounts for 68%, according to BitCoin Charts. To buy bitcoins, anyone can go to an exchange, like Mt Gox (which has had its own problems) and convert their local currency.

Some US companies, such as blogging platform giant, WordPress, already accept bitcoins. Webservices like bitcoin because there are no transaction fees, like a credit card, and chargebacks. Yet, the digital currency give law enforcement fits as it makes transactions almost untraceable (though some researchers have done it).